Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  The hospitals that were in place still fell dreadfully short in caring for the volume of soldiers returning from the front lines. There were simply not enough beds and supplies to go around. Fed up with seeing so many brave men coming back and receiving pitiful care, the queen founded her own hospitals in and around London. One of the more famous ones, the Queen’s Hospital in Roehampton, was designed specifically for soldiers who had lost limbs in combat. The hospital treated an estimated twenty thousand amputees during the war, but even that was believed to be only half of the men who had lost limbs between 1914 and 1918. Mary said it broke her heart to see “so many men without arms, legs, etc, etc.” Her hospitals created a sense of solidarity between the people and their queen. Many people saw her as Regina Mater, their mother-queen. When one member of Parliament was returning from visiting his daughter at the Queen’s Hospital at Stratford East, he bumped into the Prince of Wales, who asked where he had been. “To your Ma’s place, of course,” he replied. For the rest of Mary’s life, her hospitals would always be known as “Ma’s place.”911

  As devoted as she was to her cause, Mary’s work took a heavy toll on her emotions; her appearance of temperance and dignity had a high price. She internalized all of her emotions since her father’s stroke in Florence. True to form as a child of the Victorian era, she did not know how to release them. She never flew into dramatic rage like her father or threw fits of high drama like mother-in-law, Queen Alexandra; and she did not know how to sink into her grief and tears like Queen Victoria did after Prince Albert’s death. For Mary, one form of relief was knitting. The stress and horror she absorbed was released as she worked her needles and yarn. Needlework had always been a hobby she enjoyed, ever since she became the patron of the London Needlework Guild in 1897. It was later renamed Queen Mary’s Needlework Guild in 1914 in her honor. One observer at Windsor Castle noted how “when the Queen spoke of a poison-gas victim whom she had visited her needles clicked faster and faster as she bit back her emotions.”912 Those overwhelming emotions the queen felt were closer to home than most people realized. Many forgot that Mary had two sons in the war and—like any loving mother—was worried sick about their safety. The Prince of Wales was notorious for living on the edge. He made a regular habit of dashing off to the front lines on his bicycle. He was never intentionally placed in harm’s way, but he created a believable illusion of sharing in the soldiers’ suffering. It earned him tremendous popularity from the people, who enjoyed the thought of their heir to the throne in the trenches with the common man. David’s brother Bertie saw more combat during the war. Having joined the Royal Navy, he served in the Battle of Jutland.

  Added to this worry over Mary’s sons were concerns her husband’s well-being. It was no secret that the king did not have the strongest constitution. His immediate family seems to have inherited a number of health issues from his Danish relatives. Queen Alexandra was partially deaf and walked with a limp, the result of rheumatic fever. His brother Eddy had been sickly for most of his life. Even his sister Queen Maud of Norway suffered from “delicate health,” which made it necessary for her “to make prolonged visits to England, whose temperate climate suited her better than the harsh Scandinavian winters.”913 Of his immediate family, George seemed the most robust, but that was only relative. The time he spent inspecting British forces did not help his stamina. At Hesigneul in 1915, he was thrown from his horse, which afterward fell on him. It took four days for doctors to diagnose the king with a fractured pelvis and broken ribs. “I still have to walk with a stick,” he wrote to Nicholas II a year later. “A horse is a very heavy thing to fall on you and I suffered a great deal of pain, as I was badly crushed and bruised.” Those around the king could see the effect it had on both his nerves and his temperament. “Very often I feel in despair,” he later wrote to Nicholas.914

  In the winter of 1916, one of the greatest tragedies in Queen Mary’s life struck. On December 5, her beloved aunt Augusta, the stalwart Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, died at the age of ninety-four. The two women had stayed in touch during the war thanks to the intermediary efforts of George’s cousin Crown Princess Margaret of Sweden. In one of Augusta’s last letters to Mary, which she composed on her deathbed, she wrote, “Tell the King, that it is a stout old English heart that is ceasing to beat.” When the end finally came a few days later, the elderly grand duchess uttered only one word with her final breath: “May!”915 When the news reached Mary on December 6, she and George were in the midst of a cabinet crisis that ended with David Lloyd George being elected prime minister. Mary confided in her diary that night, “I heard that my most beloved Aunt Augusta died yesterday morning after a month’s illness which I had known of. She suffered little pain, only great weakness and slept much. A great relief to me, having been devoted to each other.”916 During her life, the “old autocrat” Augusta had taken on “the role of second mother to her niece,” and “had exerted a powerful influence on Mary. Above all she showed her the best in two disparate ways of life, the English and the German, and it was the Grand Duchess’s fierce patriotism that kindled in the Queen a love of Britain and the British that glowed to the end.”917 It pained the queen deeply that she was unable to attend the funeral because of the war. Although Mary and George were devoted to one another, the queen took special delight in confiding certain things to her aunt, woman to woman.

  18

  Imperial Endgame

  (January–March 1917)

  Russia had finally reached its breaking point. By mid-January 1917, plots to get rid of Alexandra and replace Nicholas were widespread, even among members of the imperial family. Even Minnie and Xenia talked about appealing to the tsar to have Alexandra removed to a convent. Minnie, deeply worried by the deteriorating situation, wrote to her daughter Xenia.

  All the bad passions seem to have taken possession of the capital. The hatred augments daily for her [Alexandra] that is disastrous, but doesn’t open eyes yet. One continues quietly to play with the fire … What my poor dear Nicky must suffer makes me mad to think! Just everything might have been so excellent after the man’s [Rasputin’s] disappearance and now it was all spoiled by her rage and fury, hatred and feelings of revenge!… so sad.… Alexandra Feodorovna must be banished. I don’t know how but it must be done. Otherwise she might go completely mad. Let her enter a convent or just disappear.918

  Petrograd descended into anarchy after Rasputin’s murder because it showed the people that the power was within their own hands to take hold of what they wanted through force. The city’s salons became so rife with talk of revolution that General Henry Wilson, a member of the British delegation, noted incredulously, “Everyone—officers, merchants, ladies—talks openly of the absolute necessity of doing away with” the tsar and tsarina.919 The historian Bernard Pares recalled in his memoirs how a prominent member of Russian society had warned him, “Do not wish for a Russian Revolution! It will be far more savage than the French.”920

  By the early months of 1917, Petrograd was almost entirely under the control of the revolutionaries, who had armed themselves with tens of thousands of machine guns and other handheld weapons. In January, a mob of 150,000 starving people took to the streets demanding food. “Children are starving in the most literal sense of the word,” reported one police officer.921 By March, Petrograd was at a standstill, as most of the city’s workers went on strike. A mob of angry women from a textile factory flooded Nevsky Prospect demanding bread. City transportation shut down, and the newspapers stopped printing. Frightened citizens huddling inside their homes could hear the mobs crying out for revenge against Alexandra and the government. Soldiers ordered to suppress the crowds shot and killed two hundred people, but after a few days, most of the soldiers stood down, refusing to take orders from their officers.

  Desperate to stop the growing revolution, Mikhail Rodzianko, the head of the Duma, telegraphed to Tsar Nicholas II begging him to return immediately from Stavka. He warned that the garrison troops and
reserve battalions were now in open revolt and that if they managed to secure the loyalty of the army, all would be lost. Within twenty-four hours of Rodzianko sending his telegram, buildings across Petrograd were flying the revolutionary red flag. Unspeakable acts of violence were carried out against anyone who had shown loyalty to the imperial family. The tsar’s brother Grand Duke Michael was hunted by roaming bands of rioters as he tried to flee Petrograd for his home. He managed to evade the mobs, but not everyone was so lucky. Nicholas Stolypin, the imperial court chamberlain, and the procurator of the Holy Synod were both arrested. One of Nicholas II’s military commanders—General Staekelberg—was murdered when a mob stormed his home.

  The situation in Russia caused great alarm across Europe. Queen Marie of Romania, Alexandra and Nicholas’s mutual cousin, was terrified at the prospect of a Russian revolution. She noted the following in her diary in 1917:

  Their [the Russians’] hatred of the Empress has reached a terrible pitch; they consider her a misfortune for the country and there is no one to-day who would not gladly get rid of her by any means. How dreadful! I cannot imagine anything more ghastly than to be hated by one’s own people, and after all it is not so very difficult to make yourself beloved if you are Queen, in Russia especially where the Tsar and Tsarina are almost sacred figures.922

  Fleeing the unrest in Petrograd, Alexandra took her family into seclusion at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo. She seemed calm and demure to the people around her, but she was deeply worried about the future of Russia. To make matters worse, her children were gravely ill with the measles. Dressed in her Red Cross nurse’s uniform, Alexandra pushed herself to the brink of physical collapse nursing them, as well Anna Viroubova, who was also ill. Count Benckendorff, the chief marshal of the imperial court who was no fan of the tsarina, even admitted, “She is great, great … But I had always said that she was one of those people who rise to sublime heights in the midst of misfortune.”923

  Alexandra may not have fully understood the gravity of the situation, but she was very much aware that there was a power struggle being fought beyond the walls of Tsarskoe Selo. In what may have been the last letter Alexandra ever wrote to her husband as empress, she poured out her grief but also her continuing support.

  My own beloved, precious Angel, light of my life,

  My heart breaks, thinking of you all alone going through all this anguish, anxiety & we know nothing of you & you neither of us … you who are alone, no army behind you, caught like a mouse in a trap, what can you do? Thats [sic] the lowest, meanest thing unknown in history, to stop ones sovereign.… Two currents—Duma & revolutionists—two snakes who I hope will eat off each others heads.… Heart aches very much, but I don’t heed it.… Only suffer too hideously for you.… God bless & protect you—send His angels to guard & guide you … this is the climax of the bad. The horror before our Allies!! & the enemies joy!!—Can advise nothing, be only yr. Precious self. If you have to give into things, God will help you to get out of them. Ah my suffering Saint. I am one with you, inseparably one

  Old Wify924

  Giving in was exactly what Nicholas II was forced to do. As the heavily armored imperial train lumbered its way toward Petrograd with the anxious tsar on board, it was halted on March 3, 1917, at Pskov near the Estonian border. Waiting there to board the train were M. Guchkov and V. V. Shulgin, two of the Duma’s highest-ranking officials. Desperate to restore order, they confronted Nicholas and forced an ultimatum upon him. He could both rally as many loyal troops as possible and march on the capital, plunging Russia into a bloody and violent civil war, or he could abdicate. Without a second thought, Tsar Nicholas II immediately abdicated. He himself wrote out the order of abdication, which included this statement: “I invite all the loyal sons of my country to fulfill their sacred duty which is to obey the Emperor in these difficult moments, and to help him, as well as the representatives of the nation, to lead Russia to victory, success, and glory. May God help Russia!”925 Much like the similarly fated King Louis XVI of France, Nicholas refused to shed the blood of his people for the sake of keeping his throne. “Thus, with the simple stroke of a pen, Nicholas II put an end to the three-hundred-year Romanov dynasty,” wrote one historian. “With his reign ended, so too ended his wife’s position as empress.”926

  When he heard of the tsar’s decision, Emperor Charles immediately sent a letter to Wilhelm II. He did not mince words about the gravity of the situation: “We are fighting against a new enemy which is more dangerous than the Entente: international revolution, which finds its strongest ally in general starvation. I beseech you not to overlook this portentous aspect of the matter and to reflect that a quick finish to the war even at the cost of heavy sacrifice gives us a chance of confronting this coming upheaval with success.”927

  In England, King George was shaken by what was happening. “Bad news from Russia,” he wrote in his diary. “Practically a revolution has broken out in Petrograd, and some of the Guards Regiments have mutinied and killed their officers. This rising is against the Govt. not against the war.” A few days later, his suspicions as to the cause of the revolution were confirmed: “I fear Alicky is the cause of it all and Nicky has been weak … I am in despair.”928 At the same time that Nicholas II’s reign was coming to an end in March 1917, a new, highly dramatic, opulent play called Masquerade premiered at the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater in Petrograd. The Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky remarked that this “paean to the Palace proved to be a requiem for a world that, beyond the walls of the theater, was dying.”929

  At the same time as Russia was undergoing an existential supernova, the pattern of victory the Central powers were enjoying began to disintegrate. In April 1917, the United States entered the war on the side of the Entente, which informally changed its name to the Allies. The move had been in the works since a German submarine sank the Lusitania, a British cruise liner, in May 1915. More than one thousand civilians were killed, including a number of Americans. “No gentleman would kill so many women and children,” Wilhelm II embarrassedly told the American ambassador.930 In Austria, Emperor Charles I was under no illusions about what the entry of the Americans into the war meant. He told his wife, “Now it’s the end. If America comes in we are finished for good.”931 Along with their munitions and supplies, the Americans contributed nearly four million additional troops to the war effort. Within a few months, ten thousand new soldiers were arriving in France daily.

  The sinking of the Lusitania and the subsequent entry of the United States into the war led to major political crisis in Germany. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg was forced to resign after coming under fire from the Reichstag’s Peace Resolution, a coalition of the Social Democrats, Progressives, and Centrists. Bethmann-Hollweg’s replacement was Georg Michaelis, Germany’s first nonaristocratic chancellor. He remained in office for only four months. On October 31, 1917, he too was forced to resign for his unwillingness to support the Reichstag’s peace initiatives. He was replaced by seventy-five-year-old Count Georg Hertling.

  Emperor Charles had known since he was still an archduke that unless something was done to end the war, the damage to Austria-Hungary and the rest of Europe could be irreparable. As early as January 29, 1917, Zita’s two brothers Sixtus and Xavier met with their mother, the Duchess of Parma, in Switzerland to make preliminary and unofficial peace overtures. The emperor sent his old friend, Count Erdödy, to represent him at the meeting. In the Austrian foreign ministry there was some apprehension at the idea of Austria-Hungary pursuing a separate piece, since the alliance that bound it with the other Central powers was very close-knit. But the growing danger against monarchism, fueled by events in Russia, meant that peace might be the only way to save Austria-Hungary from its own revolution. In April, his foreign minister penned a prophetic note explaining that if “the monarchs of the Central Powers are unable to conclude peace in the next few months, the peoples will do so over their heads, and then the waves of revolution will sw
eep away everything for which our brothers and sons are still fighting and dying today.”932

  The appeals Charles made for peace through the usual diplomatic channels had failed. The only alternative he and Zita could think of to find a peaceful solution was to use the empress’s brother in the Belgian army—Prince Sixtus—to open the lines of communication with France. With his intellectual prowess, erudition, and reputation as a Renaissance man, Sixtus was the natural choice to act as a conduit between Vienna and Paris if there was to be any hope for peace. Raymond Poincaré, the French president, expressed interest in an article Sixtus had published in a French magazine that called for peace via Charles and Zita. The ensuing episode, which would ultimately help to topple Charles from the throne, would come to be known infamously as the Sixtus Affair.

  In early 1917, Charles ordered his military attaché in Switzerland to look into making contact with Sixtus “in order to sound out the readiness for peace on the other side.”933 The emperor and empress of Austria’s peace initiatives were motivated not only by a desire to preserve their empire from any further losses but also to ally Austria with France and Britain against Germany. A British intelligence report from June 1917 cited that the “Emperor and Empress are entirely pro-French and pro-English. They are strongly anti-German and hate (a) the Kaiser (b) Prince Rupprecht [of Bavaria] both on political and private grounds. The Kaiser insulted the present Empress when she was young: Prince Rupprecht is a course [sic] dissolute Prussianised atheist who bullies the Emperor and Empress for their religious and moral principles.”934